Original Disney art and rare Mickey Mouse scooter toy among the top lots in Hake's auctionA beautiful, full-color catalog packed with tantalizing early comic character items brought out the bidders in Hake’s Americana & Collectibles’ Auction No. 193, which closed for bidding on Jan. 31.

Another important example of original art was the 9˝-inch by 12-inch sheet of animation paper with 16 pencil sketches of a long-billed Donald Duck. The sheet was marked “Wise Little Hen,” referring to the 1934 Disney Silly Symphony cartoon in which the irascible duck in sailor’s jacket and hat made his animation debut. The lot sold for $34,500.

Art of another form, a 27-inch by 41-inch linen-mounted poster for the Oct. 17, 1927 Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon Great Guns also well exceeded expectations, settling at $23,000. Marvelous in its simplicity, the ultra-desirable Disney poster features Oswald in a World War I doughboy’s helmet, preparing to fire off a miniature cannon.

While graphic design made a powerful statement regarding its strength in the marketplace, results showed that early comic character toys, figurines and superhero items are also booming. An extremely rare circa-1931 celluloid and tin Mickey Mouse on Scooter wind-up toy with its even rarer pictorial box streaked to a winning bid of $37,041.73. Manufactured by Nifty and distributed by George Borgfeldt & Co., the Japanese-made toy with a Walt E. Disney copyright was described in Hake’s catalog as “the rarest boxed Mickey mechanical toy we’ve offered in four decades.”

Alex Winter, general manager of Hake’s, described the scooter’s selling price – which made triple the reserve – as “certainly the big surprise of the auction. We knew it was rare and the best one known with its box, and I felt $20,000 to $25,000 would not be unrealistic, but rarity and condition were the key here. It was one of those things that collectors knew they might not see again in that condition, so some who wanted to own an example of this toy obviously felt it was the right time to buy.”

Of the character bisques offered, top honors went to a German-made set of five figurines based on the very early Winsor McKay comic strip Little Nemo, which ran in the New York Herald and William Randolph Hearst’s New York American in the second decade of the 20th century. The set of bisques, with movable arms and detailing to replicate the distinctive features of characters Little Nemo, Princess, Flip, Doctor Pill and Imp, was pictured in the May 1914 issue of the toy trade publication Playthings. In its day, the set probably had a wholesale price equaling today’s typical pocket change. In Hake’s January 2008 sale, the complete set, with provenance from the Gary Selmonsky collection,